June Sekera

I am a Visiting Scholar at The New School for Social Research, a Senior Research Fellow at Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center, and a Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose at University College London. I am a public policy scholar and researcher whose work for the past three years has been focused on policy with regard to one particular form of climate change intervention: reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide. I initiated and directed a project to investigate the scientific literature on industrial carbon removal methods in order to evaluate their effectiveness using a standard of “collective biophysical need”. The results were published in 2020 in Biophysical Economics and Sustainability: “Assessing Carbon Capture: Public Policy, Science and Societal Need; A review of the literature on industrial carbon removal.” The findings included the discovery that, in the U.S., federal and state governments are offering subsidies for mechanical carbon removal methods that emit more CO2 into the air than they remove.

I am also director of the Public Economy Project at The New School, Heilbroner Center. Author of The Public Economy in Crisis; A Call for a New Public Economics (2016), I have published a wide range of papers on the public economy. For over twenty years, I held programmatic, leadership and management positions at federal, state and local levels of government. My economics training was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government (MPA, 1984).